“Flying Paper” is a 2014 film documenting the attempt by Palestinian children and youth in Gaza to break the Guinness World Record for flying the most kites simultaneously.
Here’s the trailer.
During recent protests, near the so-called security apparatus that’s been constructed around Gaza, kites with burning tails were drifted over into Israel resulting in some fires. In total, some 7000 acres of farmland have been damaged and some $2 million has been spent on extinguishing whatever fires were started. Hardly big cheese then.
And just not at all congruent with the assertion made three weeks ago by the US’s Mideast envoy that “attack kites” were “indiscriminate weapons” or as reported in The Times of Israel, Israel’s Public Security Minister calling for a “program of assassinations targeting those who fly burning kites from Gaza to Israel”
I lost count of the numbers of Palestinians wounded and killed by Israeli fire over the duration of the demonstration leading up to the 5th of June – the day that marked 70 years since Palestinians had been dispossessed of their homes and land, that often enough lies impossibly far away and in clear sight on the Israeli side of the Gaza wall/fence/barrier/border.
And now, on the tail end of whatever international condemnation there may have been over the slaughter of unarmed Palestinians by Israeli armed forces, Prince William, The Duke of Cambridge, is gracing Israel with an official state visit that’s (according to The Guardian) “hugely significant for UK-Israel relations”.
It makes me wonder how genuine the furore being driven over the Trump Administration’s treatment of would be immigrants actually is. Or how much it’s just more of that same old yanking on the heart strings of a populace, meant to keep us busy and occupied with an endless stream of temporary distractions, while the real business of business grinds on – unchallenged, out of sight, beneath it all.
Or maybe there’s a rationale that would explain wh Mexicans, but not Palestinians? Or Syrians, but only when the photograph of a dead baby boy’s is circulated by the world’s media, and certainly not when people voluntarily venture into the Mediterranean or across the English Channel to bring people to safety?
It might seem that human tragedy is to be seen as a series of disjointed adverts in close up, presuming to elicit contradictory and ephemeral emotional responses in us. It might seem we are not to see any dots, or join any dots or look at the big picture. It might seem we are to surrender to an idea of so much going on that no one is able to keep track of it, and so retreat to our personal, manipulated orbits and enjoy them while they last.
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